On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

The skills required to read well are no great mystery. Reading well is, well, simple (if not easy). It just takes time and attention.

Practice makes perfect, but pleasure makes practice more likely, so read something enjoyable.

Speed-reading is not only inferior to deep reading but may bring more harm than benefits: one critic cautions that reading fast is simply a “way of fooling yourself into thinking you’re learning something.”

Worse yet, “speed-reading gives you two things that should never mix: superficial knowledge and overconfidence.”

Thoughtfully engaging with a text takes time. The slowest readers are often the best readers, the ones who get the most meaning out of a work and are affected most deeply by literature.

Read books you enjoy, develop your ability to enjoy challenging reading, read deeply and slowly, and increase your enjoyment of a book by writing words of your own in it.

To read well is not to scour books for lessons on what to think. Rather, to read well is to be formed in how to think.

Reading well adds to our life—not in the way a tool from the hardware store adds to our life, for a tool does us no good once lost or broken, but in the way a friendship adds to our life, altering us forever.

In other words, plot reveals character. And the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character.

All literature—stories most obviously—centers on some conflict, rupture, or lack. Literature is birthed from our fallenness: without the fall, there would be no story.

This points to a problem in the purity culture popular today in some strains of Christianity. The movement’s well-intentioned attempt to encourage believers to remain virgins until marriage unfortunately misses the mark by inadvertently making sexual purity a means to an end (such as alluring a fine marriage partner or being rewarded with a great sex life once married) rather than being a virtue in itself.

Courage can be excellent only as it is “‘informed’ by prudence.”21 The truly courageous person “does not suffer injury for its own sake.”

But faith as a virtue has a particular meaning, one expressed in the Bible when it explains that faith comes from the grace of God, not from human works (Eph. 2:8–9). Faith is the “instrument” that brings us to the Christ who saves us.1

Faith, along with hope and love, is a theological virtue. The theological virtues differ from the cardinal virtues because they are not attained by human power but come from God.

Reading virtuously, reading faithfully, depends greatly on accepting a text on its own terms and attending to how it is told as much as, if not more than, what it tells.

To despair over politics—regardless of which side of the political divide one lands on—as many Christians have done in the current apocalyptic political climate, is to forget that we are but wayfarers in this land. Choosing hope—whether amid the annihilation of the world or merely a political breakdown—is virtuous.

He remains watchful all the time on the road. When the boy asks if he’s scared, he says, “Well. I suppose you have to be scared enough to be on the lookout in the first place. To be cautious. Watchful.”

Watchfulness is part of hope. Watchfulness counters both despair and sloth, which is the “beginning and root of despair” and inhibits “courage for the great things.”52 Sloth is considered a capital sin because it prevents a person from becoming what God wants her to be and who she truly is.53

Magnanimity “requires humility, so that it truthfully estimates its own possibilities, rather than exaggerate them.”58 Hope is thus bordered on one extreme by magnanimity and on the other by humility.

The hope seen in The Road is ultimately merely human hope, the natural passion that Aquinas says we share with the animals: the arduous pursuit of some good.

Theological hope is an implicit surrender to the help of another—God—in obtaining a good. Theological hope requires a similar recognition of one’s own limitations as required by the natural passion of hope.

Hope is, like all virtues, a practice. It is autobiographical, the story of the one who possesses it, “stretching [that story] forward to its best possible ending.”

Hope exists only where there are obstacles to achieving the good, and the good that one seeks in hope is arduous.

“Flourishing is good,” Taylor writes; “nevertheless, seeking it is not the ultimate goal” for the believer.91 God is the highest good for the Christian believer. Or goodness for another kind of believer.

We need companionship—love—so badly that if we lack it, we will create the illusion of it, as Noland does with his volleyball named Wilson, just to survive.

The Christian understanding of love offers a sharp contrast to this linguistic and moral fuzziness. The Greek of the New Testament uses a variety of words to refer to various kinds of love.

Augustine explains that love is the “impulse” to “enjoy God on his own account and one’s neighbor on account of God.” In contrast, cupidity (or lust) is “the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbor and any corporeal thing not on account of God.”

As the most famous line from the novel says, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore, most terrible.”26 There is perhaps no more apt object of pity than he who thinks himself exceptional but turns out to be merely ordinary. The

tragedy, of course, is not in failing to be exceptional but in the greater loss of rejecting the glories of everyday gifts.

Because friendship is not necessary to human existence in the way that food and sex are, Lewis says, it should be valued all the more in being “freely chosen.”

How we die will depend on how we live and how we love, as The Death of Ivan Ilych helps us see. Its vision of charity—love given and received—is the image of the servant who, by tending the feet of others, bears their suffering.

Temperance disciplines all the human appetites. As a kind of temperance, chastity tempers in particular the part of human vitality related to our desire to reproduce and to experience companionship.

Like temperance, chastity demands more than mere suppression or denial for healthy discipline. Chastity is the proper ordering of one good thing (sexual desire) within a hierarchy of other good things.

Fidelity to another person, particularly in marriage, is more than physical. Sexual unfaithfulness wreaks certain pain and irreparable damage to a relationship. Yet so too does emotional infidelity, as Ethan Frome powerfully shows.

In sum, lust of the flesh centers on temptations that originate within the body, with our inner appetites (sexual or otherwise), and lust of the eyes on temptations originating externally, with things we perceive and then desire to possess. The pride of life combines the two, appealing to the internal desire to be like God and seeking fulfillment of this through external shows of power.

The romantic meal Ethan and Mattie share proves to be both the height and the pit of their illicit love, a reminder that “sin entered the world through the bodily act of eating.”

But at some point in the modern age, people were led to think that while some things might be hard and so must be worked at—things like work, school, raising children, maintaining health, even life itself—a marriage that is hard must be quit.

While chastity is formed in and sustained in community, lust “thrives in privacy and alienation, and lustful people often feel alone.”

Lust derives from a feeling of lack, and nothing feels more lacking than a sense of isolation. It is probably not coincidental that the technology that makes pornography omnipresent is the very technology that is isolating human beings from one another more and more and generating greater loneliness.

Marriage is not only about mutual companionship and romantic love, but it is the institution “out of which cultures and societies are formed.”

Unlike abstention, an act of an individual, chastity is a form of community, and chastity depends on community. We can’t always choose where we place our roots, but when we can, it’s important to choose well.

Sloth is commonly thought of as laziness, but it’s much more than that. (We saw in chapter 6 that sloth opposes magnanimity, for example.) Sloth involves not only a lack of effort but also a lack of care. In fact, the Greek word for sloth, acedia, literally means “without care” or “careless.”

Sloth refers not only to “a certain weariness of work” but also to “a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good.” This is why Aquinas defined sloth as “sorrow for spiritual good.”3 It is a mortal sin in “robbing us of our appetite for God, our zest for God, our interest and enjoyment in God. Sloth stops us from seeking God, and that means we do not find him.”

Diligence is probably both the hardest and the easiest virtue to cultivate. It’s easy in the sense that it’s inherently simple: whatever it is you are doing, keep at it with care and attention, and then keep at it some more.

Traditional Christianity (unlike some modern iterations) emphasizes the fact that salvation does not promise ease and comfort but is more likely, as church history shows (particularly that period of history surrounding Bunyan’s lifetime), to bring suffering and trial. The virtue of diligence is necessary, therefore, to persevere.

Everything good in my life that I have accomplished, I’ve done only through prolonged diligence. Writing books, especially, takes me to the limits of my diligence. My ideas don’t pour out like champagne from a bottle that bursts open with a pop.

Implicit in the word humility is the acknowledgment that we “all come from dust, and to dust all return” (Eccles. 3:20). Like the earth itself, the humble person is lowly. The person of humility is—literally and figuratively—grounded.

The Beatitudes describe the characteristics of the humble: the poor in spirit, the meek, the mournful, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness. But the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t merely praise these qualities; it offers a paradoxical promise in which all of those who are last shall be first.